Won OST Predictions

congratulations to our winner, joeyboy! i'd say you've reinforced your consistent success in ou with this tournament win. better luck next time, ricky - you did a good job making it this far.

i watched the finals replay, which you can see here, and was surprised to find that despite ricky having a seemingly advantageous team matchup, he still managed to, well, blunder it away with his prediction always being one step behind joeyboy's kyurem-black and celebi core. he lost essentially two and a half pokemon due to his misplays, and thus allowed joeyboy a clean window to set up with his celebi (which i'm shocked ricky allowed, due to skarmory walling it fairly easily). i think this goes to show the sheer stallbreaking power of kyu-b against stall when it's running a mixed set. pretty threatening. sacrificing latias early was, again, the wrong play in my opinion, but when you're facing a +2 ludicolo in rain, i understand options are limited. however, i really feel that ricky should have won this battle based on the matchup, and only his failures combined with a few key outpredictions by joeyboy lead to the outcome of this round.

once again, congrats to joeyboy, and look forward to the next installment of ou's team style tournaments!

Congratulations Joeyboy! Awesome battle, too. As soon as Latias went down, I thought it was pretty much over. After that he had no safe switchin to Keldeo. Skarmory could take Secret Sword and Blissey everything else, but nothing could take both. Plus the misplays against Kyurem-B really really hurt. Still a great match!

Round 1: So I had Hail vs. Sun Round 1 and I was thinking I wouldn't have a very long tournament run. But then I decided to build a new team for this one battle. Added things like Tormentran, RP Landorus, Hidden Power Fire Latias and it definitely performed well. I had this one pretty in the bag before it started. I brought a pretty excellent (imo) anti-sun hail team, and hoped to use Tormentran to tear some butts up, ended up still losing it to Dugtrio but then Landorus set up and finished it as Cress had been removed.

Round 2: Sand vs. Rain. This was the round I first used Kyurem-B and kinda the reason why it became one of my favorites. It can set up Subs on some many 'mons and just rips common teams apart once it has.

Round 3: Rain vs. Sand. This was probably my most "regular" team of the tournament. I just used the standard defensive core plus Scarf Jirachi, DD Gyarados, and Sub Kyu-B. I remember on the OU "Is Stall Viable" thread that a bunch of people talked about how weak Sand is to Kyu-B and since I had such success with it last round I decided to add it again. It was a fun game.

Round 4: Sand vs. Rain. Oh man I thought this game was over on Turn 6 haha. I got to end it on a pretty cool note though, Healing Wish into Ludicolo sweep xD Come down to the wire though, it was practically a 50/50 that leaned a little to my side. This game had me sweating, but I knew how I could potentially win, but Cyredax kinda had to play right into it :/ He really shouldn't have brought Rain back up.

Semi-Finals: Hail vs. Rain. Hydro Pump miss had me sweating. But I knew I could still win it if Abomasnow could break that Jirachi's sub. Kyu-B's a star.

Finals: Sand vs. Rain. Like Lavos said this game really could've gone the other way, but I had a pretty solid game plan through out. Oh man I really wanted a +2 SpA Swift Swim Ludicolo sweep, oh man oh man. I built this team to try and end games against Rain teams as quickly as possible, but man I didn't see Ludicolo getting outspeed. Regardless it was fun.

Aight here's all my replays, I just wanted to quickly share them and my kind of "philosophy" for this tournament. This tournament was cool because you had a lot of information about your opponent's team before going into battle. In a metagame where team match-up is so crucial this made for some very interesting ideas. You'll see I used Kyurem-B a lot in these games. That beast has gone from an "eh" Pokemon in my eyes to a total badass. Seriously it played pretty important roles in most of the games it was in(besides the misplay against the EB Keldeo in Round 4). Anyway I really enjoyed this tour, I felt I got to use some cool Pokemon/ sets. Thanks Lavos for getting it back on track!

seems like most his opponents choked or he got lucky (freeze) ?_?
the idea of the tour is nice and counterweather basically means ur team is a team based off the opponent's weather (ie u can have 2 swift swimmers + sashtar so u lose weather war early) and intentionally let ur weather die to take advantage of ur opponent's weather. cool tour shame i wasnt aware of this during sign ups